Our nation’s Congress passed the Antiquities Act in 1906 to protect ancient American Indian sites, but Deputy Assistant Attorney General Jean Williams asked a federal judge not to accept legal documents from archaeologists objecting to Trump’s largely dismantling two national monuments in Utah. She said the blitz of documents was “inherently prejudicial” to Trump and the other defendants.

“Federal defendants do not have adequate time or space to address every formulation of the arguments,” Williams wrote.

Williams works in the environmental division, led by Jeffrey Bossert Clark, who represented BP in lawsuits over the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, the nation’s largest oil spill.

ACTION BOX/What You Can Do About It

Jeffrey Clark (Photo By Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call)

Call Assistant Attorney General Jeffrey Clark at 202-514-2701 to tell him your thoughts on using taxpayer money to try to muzzle archaeologists who want to protect Native American sites on our public lands or write him at Department of Justice, 950 Pennsylvania Ave., NW, Washington, D.C. 20530-0001.

Archaeologists who aren’t plaintiffs in the lawsuit want to file documents in the case. The American Anthropological Association and the Archaeological Institute of America helped draft the Antiquities Act, giving presidents the authority to create national monuments. Other groups, including 26 U.S. senators and 92 U.S. representatives, also want to weigh in. Judge Tanya Chutkan, an Obama appointee hearing the lawsuit in federal court Washington. D.C., will decide.

Only 5% to 7% of Grand Staircase has been surveyed. The monument is rich in rock art and petroglyphs and has 3,985 officially recorded archaeological sites. Trump’s proclamation would remove protections from 1,915 of those sites, including ones dating back to the end of the last Ice Age.

The Lampstand, known for Ancestral Puebloan villages, and the Hole-in-the-Rock Road, a historic trail used by Mormon settlers, were both removed from Grand Staircase.